Who's our Mozart?

Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

Amarok by Mike Oldfield

Joe's Garage by Frank Zappa

Here in the latter days we're witnessing a phenomenon not to be repeated any time soon-- rock stars shaking the crawdaddies out of their ear-holes and asking themselves, “How will I be remembered in the grand scheme of things, a hundred years from now?”

Suddenly the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, and many others-- after years of listless drift-- are thinking of posterity and putting out records that don't... you know... blow. Now these old guys (or their robotic stand-ins, in the case of the Stones) are getting out there and shaking their fannies like they were starving, anonymous street fighters once again. A Police reunion? Cream? Really? Weren't those guys all trying to murder each other, back in the day? The Beach Boys? Steely Dan? Are Gilbert and Sullivan about to rise from the grave? Is this “Plan Nine from Outer Space” all over again? Martin Scorsese, aside from directing gangster movies, has discovered a lucrative sideline filming documentaries about these same Big Names (so far: The Band, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones) aimed directly at as yet unborn historians, detailing what a fruitful and fecund time this second Elizabethan era was, musically speaking.

Recently it came to light that the “cute Beatle” wanted the legendary Lennon/ McCartney credit reversed, in the case of Beatles' songs he'd written, or mainly written, himself; so future historians (as yet unborn) would know what was what. Why not take a case of dynamite to Mt. Rushmore while you're at it, and switch some of those famous names too? Its the legacy thing writ large, don't you see? From ABBA to Led Zeppelin everyone wants to get the record straight before they pass. And assuming the Beatles would be remembered as the Twentieth Century's equivalent of Mozart, the “cute Beatle” didn't care to be perceived playing second fiddle, Joseph Haydn to John Lennon's brilliant little flower of the Danube, the golden child of Salzburg who set the world's ears to ringing, then died young and left a legacy too daunting to be touched by any composer since.

Or did he?

Who (if anyone) is our Mozart?

There are plenty of candidates to go around, but there are plenty of Mozarts too. The “famous Mozart” is probably the best point of comparison to the Beatles, as the Beatles' fame within their era will probably never be surpassed in a future one. Those guys were like Croesus. They were Sun Kings by age twenty-five, they couldn't get more famous. And Mozart was the most famous composer of the 18th century too, right? Oh but wait-- Mozart wasn't particularly famous in the 18th century. For a few years he was a famous prodigy, in the courts of Europe, and anyone able to read a paper might have recognized his name. But by the age of twenty-one (Paul McCartney's age at the on-set of Beatlemania) Mozart the child prodigy was a dying memory, and Mozart the composer, although well regarded, was but one of many well regarded composers in Vienna, and neither the most popular nor most favoured. By the 19th century Mozart's “popularity,” such as it was, had faded further still. The Victorians saw him as a quaint throwback to a dusty, earlier time, unremarkable amid the titanic noise conjured by Brahms, Mahler, Wagner, and many others. Only in the 20th century (with a little help from his friends, Thomas Edison and Deutsche Gramophone) was Mozart up-lifted into the golden clouds as the beacon of creative genius we take him for today.

Well then, what of that? What of Mozart the polymath? Mozart the instrumentalist? Mozart the prolific, god-like composer? The Beatles were gifted and prolific too, weren't they? What I'm about to say is going to make some of you really, really mad, I know, and for that I apologize-- but although the argument can be made that the Beatles, like Mozart, were prolific for their time-- twelve albums over seven years (depending how you count them: its complicated) and not a clunker in the lot-- when it came to sheer innovation the Beatles had it over Mozart hands down.

Mozart was the final and greatest manifestation of the Classical era (1740-1815)-- truly the flower of the Danube. He perfected classical music in all its assorted forms, from songs to string and wind quartets, quintets, septets, choral music, concertos, sonatas, sacred music, symphonies, full blown operas. At fourteen years old he was commissioned to write an opera for the Polish court. The court musicians were offended: they were to perform an opera written by a child? A... German child? That German child! When the opera began arriving, however, they changed their tune. Now the question was-- this was written by a fourteen year-old!? A German fourteen year old? That German fourteen year old! The Polish musicians were stupefied. It defied credulity, but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart added nothing to the understanding of what else these musical structures could do, or what music could become. That little chore, after Mozart's untimely death at thirty-five (in 1791) was left to his erstwhile pupil, Ludwig van Beethoven, who, with his furrowed brow, thunderhead of flying hair, his bulldog expression of undaunted determination, punched, kicked, whipped and hurled classical music bodily into the waiting arms of the Romantic era, thus changing the direction of Western music, and Western culture forever.

The Beatles did exactly the same thing, starting with covers or original songs on all the conventional themes: he loves her but she loves the other guy. Its a tragedy. She broke his heart but, fear not, he'll brave it out, because he's Lord Byron in a mop-top. And so on. Blah blah blah. But a mighty change was wrought between the first and final of those Beatles records, between “I Want to Hold your Hand,” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” The Beatles, like the Romantics before them, the greatest being Beethoven, made it OK to speak your mind-- rather than bleed your heart-- in music; mere advancement of form morphed into art, and Western music never looked back. So in that regard I suppose you could call the Beatles the Beethovens of our time. They even recorded a saucy little song on that subject. But they were just too darned clever to be “merely” Mozarts.

I hear you, with a Jack Benny insouciance as you slap an open hand to your cheek, muttering in exasperation, “Now Peter! Just you hold on a gosh darned minute! Yuh-yuh-yuh speak of the 20th century as though it didn't begin until 1962! What about Puccini? Bizet? Shostakovich? Mozart wrote an opera about a magic flute. Shostakovich wrote an opera about a nose! If nothing else, they were both very idiosyncratic.

True, an opera about a nose is a refreshingly weird idea, but the composers of the earlier part of the century were working in musical genres that had already been exhausted by their predecessors. George Bernard Shaw once pointed out that quite often whole cultural fields of endeavor, lovingly grown and tended to by hundreds of artists, are often “harvested” in a single stroke by one man of unsurpassable genius, arriving at just the right time. He was thinking of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe... and probably himself. But the point is well taken. Theatre in Elizabethan times-- the other Elizabethan times-- was doing great business, then along came Shakespeare to reap the reward. Who can name three plays by Ben Johnson, or Christopher Marlowe? Who can't name three plays by Shakespeare? An Eskimo up at the North Pole, maybe. A leprechaun.

He harvested the field.

The same was true nearly 200 years later with Mozart. You can't perfect what's already been perfected, so if perfection is what you're after you need to start anew. Had Mozart lived to be as old as Beethoven, we might not have needed a Beethoven to cajole Classical music into the Romantic era. Into the 19th Century, Johannes Brahms suffered under Beethoven's shadow and knew it. Beethoven only wrote nine symphonies, and there was no need for a tenth. Wagner, squirming under that same Teutonic gaze, got smart: he concentrated his efforts where Beethoven was weakest-- opera (the joke here is that Mozart wrote twenty-odd operas, and Beethoven only wrote one, Fidelio, but to his credit he re-wrote it twenty times.) Here, Wagner discovered, there was still room to perfect, to harvest the field, and opera was never the same again.

Also, he gave us Broomhilde.

So, say we give the 20th Century fifty years to get over the old guard and cultivate new musical fields, who came along to perfect the genre, to reap the harvest? Three names come instantly to mind and none of them are the names of the Fab Four.

MILES DAVIS

Miles Dewey Davis III (1926-1991) POB: Alton, Illinois.

Kind of Blue. Need I say more?

Oh, I do? OK then...

Miles Davis's influence on the most American of musical genres, Jazz, can hardly be exaggerated-- if anything it's hard to conceive. Beginning as a feature musician in other people's bands, by the early '50s-- the “Birth of the Cool” era-- he was a headliner in his own right and spearheading advancements in bebop, “cool” jazz, hard bop, modal jazz and finally jazz fusion. What jazz fusion was fusing with was pop, rock, progressive rock and anything else that was coming around the bend. Jimi Hendrix reputedly wanted to play with him (Miles was an admirer of Hendrix) and Carlos Santana did play with him. At a gala awards ceremony, legend has it, a (presumably short-sighted) dowager in diamonds and minks asked Davis what he'd done to be invited, to which Davis correctly replied that he had invented modern jazz. And what, pray, had she done “besides being rich and white” for the same privilege, he replied.

Over a long and illustrious career Miles put out 48 studio albums, 36 live albums, 35 compilation albums and a ton of other stuff besides, but what he's most loved and remembered for is Kind of Blue. Each year on Rolling Stone's “Hundred Greatest albums of the 20th Century”, Kind of Blue never fails to crack the top ten (it was released in 1959) and is the first Jazz album to show up on the list, the second, only a few rungs further down being Bitches Brew, by Miles Dewie Davis III. Sometimes, late at night, when the kids are groovin', the wine flowin', and the hepcats gettin' stoned and tradin' fours, I get to thinking that Miles Davis is God. Even if he's not, I know whose music will be blowing through heaven's speakers.

Mike Oldfield threw together the rough component parts of Tubular Bells in his parents' house, while he was still in school (and playing with his sister Sally Oldfield in local folk clubs.) When it came time for him to pick a University, Oldfield played his father (a General Practitioner) his demo, and the wise village physician concurred that University had nothing to teach his son. Major Studios and record labels disagreed, and passed on the project as just too darned weird. Tubular Bells had no commercial potential, all and sundry agreed. So it fell to famous British billionaire screwball Richard Branson (he of Virgin Airline fame) to come to the rescue. He fronted the young Oldfield a week or two of studio time to finish the project, reasoning that Tubular Bells would at least cover its production costs, and besides would be a “prestige” debut with which to christen Virgin Music.

Tubular Bells went on to sell more than 2.6 million units in the United Kingdom alone, and Mike Oldfield, by nature a painfully shy, introspective lad, disappeared into the misty mountaintops of Northern Wales, where he could fly his remote-controlled airplanes and wait for the world to go away, which of course the world didn't want to do. When Branson finally tracked him down, Oldfield had only three words for him: “Leave me alone!” Legend has it the sorely put-upon billionaire screwball coaxed his reluctant superstar down from the misty mountaintops by offering to give him his car, which Oldfield liked.

From there he went on to produce many seminal works, in folk, Celtic and classical genres, electronic music, New Age music, and whatever other genre of music you'd care to devise, all under the umbrella, I suppose, of “progressive rock,” or more clinically (as I like to call it) “WTF?” music. Whatever you want to call it, it's creamy, beguiling stuff, a spun-sugar soufflé of notes, textures and progressions that seduces you deep into its sorcerers' cave, where next it flogs away at you with its conductor's baton, until your beaten senseless. Like Mozart, Mike Oldfield was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist (he played all twenty instruments featured on Tubular Bells), and like Mozart he perfected many musical genres without harvesting the crop. So is Mike Oldfield our Mozart? I like his odds, or would have, if it hadn't been for the existence of...

As you can plainly see, Frank Zappa died young (though not so young as Mozart) and was not born on this planet, though he died here. Try as he might Frank Zappa (like Superman) just couldn't fit into earthly society. As a kid he enjoyed making explosives, and blowing stuff up, a predilection that did little to ingratiate him with his neighbors or teachers. (All his life Zappa heaped scorn on Public Education, though in fairness he heaped scorn on everything.) His dad was a chemical engineer working for the military to develop poison gas, among other things (hence the name of one of Zappa's weirder instrumental compositions, “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask.”) Long before his first recordings he opened his own recording studio, Studio Z, and promptly got himself arrested for recording what sounded like an orgy (it wasn't.) The guy just couldn't stay out of trouble! He wrote a song called “Jewish Princess” that upset the B'nai B'rith, and rather than apologize (he refused to) he levelled the playing field by writing a song called “Catholic Girls.” Guess he wanted to show the world he was an equal opportunity offender. He tackled Scientology on Joe's Garage (featuring L. Ron Hoover and the Church of Appliantology) and the disco era with “Dancin' Fool”; the sixties hippie culture got slagged numerous times, but nowhere more savagely than on We're only in it for The Money. American politics-- both Democrat and Republican-- took a slagging on “Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel.” Zappa slagged the recording industry mercilessly all over his entire oeuvre. Joe's Garage features an imprisoned record executive named bald-headed John who snorts detergent and “plooks” too much. The song “Tinsel Town Rebellion” is another of many excellent examples, but Zappa's scorn for the industry which gave him his start, and from which he immediately fled in revulsion, was in limitless supply.

So Frank Zappa is a good fit with that final Mozart, Mozart the badass. Remember that scene in Amadeus when the young composer basically invites the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg to kiss his ass? That was a funny scene, wasn't it? Zappa lived and breathed that attitude. He insulted a senatorial sub-committee. He insulted radio and television personalities. He slagged Tipper Gore, wife of the Vice president of the United States. He became persona non grata on Saturday Night Live, a show renowned for its “irreverent” wit and “satiric take” on American life. Zappa was too much even for SNL? Now that's bad! Oh, and in his off hours he also wrote, composed, arranged, engineered and produced sixty albums of music in styles ranging from '50s rhythm and blues, soul, early rock'n'roll, orchestral music, jazz, musique concrete and much, much more. Prolific? The guy made prolific guys look like Jabba the Hut-- cross-eyed, drooling, immobile slugs! Dare I say he was prolific on a scale even approaching the Golden Child, the flower of the Danube himself? Zappa designed most of his own cover art and, time permitting, he made movies. Quite a few, actually. All that and a badass too-- not “badass” as in Mick Jagger. Not badass like Eminem or Fifty Cent or James Brown or Jay-Z or any of those well-scrubbed little posers swaggering around on MTV like the witless dickheads they are. Zappa was badass as only Johannas Chrysostomus Wolfgang Theophilus Amadeus Mozart could be badass.

And that, pure and simple, is what makes Frank Zappa our Mozart. In years to come, with a little help from his friends, Thomas Edison and Barking Pumpkin Records, he'll most surely be remembered as such by historians as yet unborn.